The National Secular Society is a campaigning atheist organisation. Its members believe that religion is a force for wickedness in this world. For some reason these simple and one would have thought perfectly obvious statements produce paroxysms of indignation in some people.
Firstly you get the defenders who say that atheism is not secularism. This is true, but in the case of the NSS irrelevant. Both words have numerous shades of meaning, but they can certainly overlap, and the NSS is situated precisely where they do: to quote Terry Sanderson, “We are a society of atheists fighting for secularism”.
From its website you can download some histories of the society, including Godless and Glad of it, Fifty years of militant secular humanism by David Tribe, who was president of the NSS between 1963 and 1971. Through their Amazon associates link, they sell anti-theism: “The God Delusion”. “God is not great”, “God, the failed hypothesis”, and “God hates you. Hate him back”. They sell badges proclaiming the bearer is an atheist, and so on. I’m sorry to belabour the point, but the core membership of the NSS is hostile to religion. It is not neutral.
I don’t think anyone has disputed that the NSS is a campaigning organisation. It is currently running campaigns against religious education: Sanderson wrote in, as it happens, the Guardian, that he wants “to abolish the concept of ‘religious education’ entirely.”
It campaigns against NHS funding for hospital chaplains; against prayers in council meetings; against religious influence in government; against religious involvement in the school system … the list goes on. These causes are all atheist as well as secularist. (I know the Accord coalition wants faith schools open to everyone and has religious members as well as the NSS. But NSS policy goes further: “One of the National Secular Society’s primary aims is the secularisation of Britain’s education system. We want all state-funded schools returned to community control”).
The question is not whether these causes are good or bad. You can make rational arguments on both sides of all of them. But the arguments the NSS makes are all atheist ones. Again, that’s not a criticism. It’s a fact.
Terry Sanderson, as head of the organisation, leads from the front. He was, for example, an enthusiastic convert to the idea that liberal believers are every bit as dangerous as fanatics.
“The liberals pave the way, open the doors and give succour to the very people they say bring their faith into disrepute. But it’s no good the liberals trying to dissociate themselves from their wilder compatriots in faith … The poor, bleating liberals [have] spent a lifetime reinforcing in their heads the childhood brainwashing that they will never overcome … the delusions of the liberals are not qualitatively different from those entertained by the Pat Robertsons or Abu Hamzas of this world.”
I’m not arguing (here) that this is silly and unpleasant. My point is that it is unquestionably militant atheism, “godless and glad of it”, to coin a phrase. Writing about the future of religion, he concluded:
“The founder of the National Secular Society, Charles Bradlaugh, said: “No man sees a religion die”. That may be so, but religions do eventually die. History is littered with their corpses. Until now they have always been replaced. But one day the human race’s growing indifference to the gods will prove more lethal than any anti-clericalist dagger. Religion will die.
I am sorry I won’t be around to see it.”
That is a perfectly legitimate viewpoint for which there is – obviously – space on cif belief. In fact I commissioned that article. But you couldn’t call it neutral towards religion.
What seems to have roused particular anger is my suggestion that he thinks catholicism is a wicked religion and its followers consequently dangerous. Why would anyone think that? Well
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, perhaps because they had read
what Sanderson wrote, on the NSS web site, in November last year:
“The Catholic Church in Britain is dying on its feet. And rightly so. The Church of England is already on life support, but it continues to twitch. Both institutions provide a playground for some of the most gruesome and horrible people you could ever wish to meet (particularly if you are a child).
… The Catholic priesthood claims to disown its own erotic nature in order to remain “pure” – and yet endless court cases show many of the “fathers” to have been wallowing in a pit of unimaginable sexual depravity.
…Politicians and diplomats bow down to these monsters and let them get away with murder (quite literally sometimes). Whatever corruption the Vatican is involved in (and it has been involved in every conceivable immorality in its time) no-one in high secular authority (the UN, for instance) dare point the finger and ask for an explanation.
Through forming alliances with some of the worst dictators and tyrants the world has ever seen, the Vatican has managed to gain for itself a small patch of land where no international law can intrude, where no inspections take place, where no questions have to be answered. And from that protected base it stretches its poisonous tentacles around the world.”
If this stuff – “
poisonous tentacles“;
“Monsters … who get away with murder”;
“Unimaginable sexual depravity” “
involved in every conceivable immorality” – were written about Jews or gay people , it would look barely sane and possibly criminal. Why should it be respected when the victims are Roman Catholics?
It’s possible that he just writes these things for effect because they are expected of the president of the National Secular Society but I don’t think so. He’s not a a hypocrite.
